Fact – Dr. Chris Thurstone has served on the Board for Project S.A.M.. Fact – Dr. Chris Thurstone published an article on his blog (which receives hardly any traffic by the way) which insinuated that marijuana use by Michael Brown may have contributed to his own murder at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri. Those two facts caused a huge buzz on social media yesterday as Dr. Thurstone was called out by many people for his insensitive comments. Those same people called out leading marijuana opponent and reefer madness champion Kevin Sabet, asking if he stands by those comments or if his organization (Project S.A.M.) would condemn them.
I retweeted many of those comments to try to bring awareness to the fact that a member of Project S.A.M. was trying to tie the murder in Ferguson to marijuana. If I could go back in time, I would have retweeted them again because I was so offended that Dr. Thurstone would try to do such a thing. Using a tragedy like the murder in Ferguson to try to spread marijuana fear and propaganda is inexcusable. For some reason, Kevin Sabet felt the need to call me out, as he has in the past, for my retweets. Kevin stated the following to me on Twitter:
Hey
@thatjohnnygreen “Johnny Green” did you get the message we deleted the tweet? You pushing misinformation now?
To which I replied:
@KevinSabet not pushing misinformation, just bringing awareness that someone from your organization was pushing misinformation.#NiceTry
For starters Mr. Sabet, if you put ‘@thatjohnnygreen’ at the start of your tweet, there’s no need to follow it up with “Johnny Green”. That’s a pro-tip from me to you. I don’t know what’s worse, having to sit in a cubicle all day doing mind numbing work for peanuts, or having to look at my phone and see that a person like Kevin Sabet is trying to rope me into an argument that he clearly can’t win? For the record, Kevin Sabet gets paid more money to speak for two hours than I do working for an entire month at my job (I don’t get paid to blog, in case Mr. Sabet was wondering). The odd thing being that Kevin often describes himself as a ‘volunteer.’
To be fair, Kevin Sabet tried to distance Project S.A.M. from Dr. Thurstone’s article, and Dr. Thurstone updated his article to try to explain that those are his views, and his views alone. But that’s too little, too late, as those actions only came after the controversy was brewing and being called out on social media. Had that not happened, I’d bet there would be no distancing at all. Dr. Thurstone’s blog article is inexcusable. But then again, so is the work of everyone involved with Project S.A.M. I can’t wait until marijuana is legalized everywhere so people like Kevin Sabet and Dr. Thurstone are out of business from a marijuana propaganda standpoint. For more on how I feel about marijuana being tied to the Ferguson murder, read this article I previously wrote at this link here. To read an article that I wrote debunking Kevin Sabet’s anti-marijuana arguments, go to this link here.
